Daisy's little mouth kept chattering non-stop, saying things like, "Luna has always liked Benny," "Luna thinks she's pretty, sometimes even puts on her mom's lipstick and runs outside," "Everyone thought you liked Benny, so they never dared to tell you about this," "How could you let Luna and Benny play Bai Suzhen and Xu Xian together"...

Zoe Young walked home alone and happened to see Benny standing timidly at the door, his eyes flickering, as if he already knew what Daisy had told Zoe Young.

A kind of unfamiliar awkwardness grew between the two as they looked at each other. Zoe Young lowered her head, walked around Benny, and knocked on the door, calling inside, "Mom, I'm back." When her mom opened the door and saw Benny standing there dumbly, she smiled and said, "Benny is here too, come in and watch some TV." Benny kept his head down, his right toe tapping the hard snow on the ground, poking out little crescent-shaped holes, and said softly, "No, thank you, Auntie, I'm going home." After her mom came in, she looked at Zoe Young sitting by the bed watching TV and asked worriedly, "Did you have a fight with Benny?" Zoe Young shook her head blankly, as if her soul had left her body, then turned back to watch the commercials. For the first time, she didn't know how to use her imagination to dispel the restlessness in her heart. It was as if she heard Athena say to Seiya, "Sorry, Seiya, the one I like is Ikki."

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6. Green Grass Stretches to the Horizon

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Later, even Zoe Young didn't expect that she and Benny would have a cold war for so long. She still accompanied her mom everywhere, and sometimes played with the other kids. Whenever that happened, she would treat Benny as background, as if he had a face as unremarkable as everyone else's, as if he wasn't Benny, as if she hadn't noticed his silent, lonely gaze at all.

Actually, she wasn't mad at him; she didn't even know what was wrong with herself. There was a confused and embarrassing question in her heart, but she didn't know how to ask her mom, so she simply ignored it. The weather grew warmer, and her mom started packing away the winter clothes. From Zoe's black coat, she pulled out a folded piece of manuscript paper, with only two names written on it.

Alan Carter, Zoe Young. Her mom looked puzzled, holding up the paper and asking Zoe, "What's this?"

Zoe Young suddenly felt very shy, a different kind of embarrassment from hearing about Luna and Benny. She tried hard to act calm and relaxed, saying, "I don't know either."

Why did she lie? She didn't know. Her mom didn't pay much attention to her expression. "Then I'll throw it away." "No!" she shouted sharply, startling her mom.

"What are you doing?" Her mom frowned, watching her daughter leap up and snatch the paper from her hand, fold it up again, and mutter to herself with her head down.

Zoe Young stared at the paper in her hand and suddenly felt something strange in her heart. It was a kind of melancholy that belonged to being six years old, as if she suddenly realized that she didn't just have the present and the future, but also something called the past. It was like Alan Carter's smile, a fleeting glimpse, existing only behind her.

She squatted down, dragged out her tin cookie box from under the bed, and carefully put the paper inside with her little trinkets.

"Oh right, Zoe, next month we can move back to Grandma's house," her mom suddenly said with a smile. Zoe Young looked up in shock.

"Are you happy?" "Happy." Actually, not happy.

She asked timidly, "Mom, didn't you say there were no empty rooms at Grandma's house?" Her mom stroked her head. "Now your cousin Lily and cousin Tilly are both sharing a room with the adults, so their room is free for us." "Why is it free now?"

"Because you're starting elementary school this September, and Grandma's house is closest to your school." Her mom smiled, very happy. "Grandma went to a lot of trouble to get you enrolled. This September you'll go to University Elementary School, the best elementary school in the city. Aren't you happy?"

There was a sense of finally making up for the regret of missing kindergarten in her mom's tone, but Zoe Young didn't notice. What she worried about was that cousin Lily and cousin Tilly must hate her now.

It was already the 24th, and next month seemed to be coming very soon.

Zoe Young could almost see Benny looking at her sadly, see him gradually fading into that translucent moon in the sky, see him, like Alan Carter, after parting, belonging to that tin cookie box called "the past"...

She looked back out the window. In the pouring rain, the little house where Benny lived stood all alone in the distance, just like every time Zoe Young told a story and caught a glimpse of Benny out of the corner of her eye, always standing far from the crowd.

On May 24, 1994, before her seventh birthday, Zoe Young suddenly understood something: seize the present. As soon as the rain stopped, she rushed out the door and ran to Benny's house to knock—these kids were all especially afraid of Benny's alcoholic dad, even Zoe Young had never dared to go to Benny's house to find him. Every time, it was Benny who came to Zoe's house to play. But this time, she forgot to be afraid and just ran all the way there.

Thank goodness, it was Benny who opened the door. Zoe Young almost burst into tears instantly and said to Benny, "I'm leaving, so I came to apologize." Unexpectedly, Benny's tears flowed even more than hers—"That's great," he said. Zoe Young was stunned, reached out and pinched his ear, glaring and shouting, "What do you mean?!" Benny, oblivious, said with teary eyes, "You finally talk to me again, that's great." It only took a minute for Seiya to find his Athena again.

Sitting side by side on a damp concrete pipe with plastic bags under them, they watched the sky gradually clear. "Hey, hey," Zoe Young excitedly tugged on Benny's sleeve, "Look, a rainbow!" In the low-rise outskirts, with no tall buildings to block the view, a huge rainbow made the world seem unreal in the half-cloudy, half-clear sky. Zoe Young looked up at such magnificent beauty, her lips curving up again and again. She felt as if she could see Demon World Mountain right in front of her, and she was about to ride the rainbow with Simic to a higher level.

"It's so beautiful," Benny said. Encouraged by the rainbow, Zoe Young finally had the courage to ask, "You and... you and Luna..." Benny blushed instantly, lowered his head, and almost inaudibly asked, "Huh?" "You and Luna..." Zoe Young looked up at the rainbow again for strength, "In the middle of winter, not wearing clothes, weren't you cold?"

"..." Finally, through Benny's extremely shy and jumbled explanation, Zoe Young figured out what had happened. Benny, invited to Luna's house to play, was forced by her to play "the princess and the bandit." Luna said that's how it was on TV, so he just followed her instructions and took off his clothes—Benny repeatedly emphasized to Zoe Young that he was still wearing his underwear—then Daisy saw them.

In the end, Benny added a difficult summary: "...It really did freeze me." Zoe Young burst out laughing, though she still thought what Benny did was embarrassing, but since he said he was forced, why shouldn't she forgive him? "But, what was on Luna's TV? The princess and the bandit?" Both Zoe Young and Benny were confused. At that age, they didn't know there was something in the world called a Category III film.

Whenever misunderstandings are cleared up and old grudges are resolved, the story is not far from its end. In the end, Zoe Young still hugged her cookie tin, blankly watching as a group of colleagues her uncle had called over, under her mom's direction, moved all their things onto the blue truck. Benny stood beside her, saying nothing, not even reminding her, "Don't forget me."

Maybe he believed Zoe Young wouldn't forget him; maybe he believed what Zoe Young had told him, "I will never leave you."

When her mom finally called her to get in the truck, Zoe Young just held back her tears and gently squeezed Benny's hand. The always-crying Benny didn't cry this time; instead, he kept smiling. Smiling, he said, "Zoe, you'll definitely become someone amazing in the future." Zoe Young was surprised. She thought, I'm already amazing. She was Seiya, she was Simic, she was a queen, the girl the three-eyed boy had a crush on, a hero, and... Benny, like a little grown-up, shook his head very seriously. "I mean, truly amazing, the kind that other people also think is amazing." Even as her mom carried her to the passenger seat, Zoe Young kept looking back again and again. On the dirt road, Benny's small figure grew farther and farther away. Suddenly, she panicked and started crying loudly, her vision blurring until all she could see was a little black dot quietly watching her leave.

The roar of the truck engine faded into the distance, and Benny never left, not even after the truck turned the corner and disappeared.